


tony, breathe.

by MANIAvinyl



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Anxiety, F/M, HYDRA shit, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Other, Panic Attack, Plane Crash, Uh that’s about it, anxiety attack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-15
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2019-08-02 17:14:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16309346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MANIAvinyl/pseuds/MANIAvinyl
Summary: After kicking ass at a hydra base, Steve and Tony take a quinjet back from Poland. Except for Hydra has fucked with their systems and shit and so they gotta crashland in Canada  and Tony flips the fuck out because he’s got that panic disorder and being isolated somewhere freaks him out. basically





	tony, breathe.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry the summary was terrible so thanks for still clicking on this. I’m literate I swear

All it was at first was an engine instability warning, just a red-light signal that Steve had ignored because, the plane should just last a few hours before they’re home, right? 

But the alarm only got louder, and suddenly there was a _crunch_ , and then a racket of metal on metal as the hull shook violently.

“Hell of a lot of turbulence,” Tony said, voice laced with concerned sarcasm, standing behind the pilot’s seat. It was only the two of them on that jet; the rest of the team had flown back the morning before. 

“We’ll make it home,” Steve assured. “Don’t w—“

But he was cut off by an even louder alarm, and another violent shake. 

“What’s wrong? Is it the engine? What’s wrong with the engine?” Tony was talking quickly, messing with the screen again.

“I’m— I’m not sure.” Steve pulled up, but nothing happened. “We’re losing altitude.”

“What’s wrong with the engine?!” Tony snapped. “FRIDAY? Can you hear me?”

“Yes, Boss.”

“Can you see what’s wrong with the left engine? Can I fix it?”

“Scanning... it appears that the internal fan is broken.”

“Okay. Steve, give me a signal if you’ve got it, right? I’m going out there.”

“No, you’re not,” Steve muttered. “Look, the engine’s failing. We’re about to crash land.”

“Unless I can fix it,” said Tony, as the suit closed around him. He moved towards the back of the jet, and looked out. The ground was approaching— Tony guessed they were over some part of Canada. 

The engine was smoking. And something inside of it was cranking; Tony could hear it from here. 

He tried to open a panel but the metal was already starting to burn. It was too late to fix it.

“This thing’s gonna blow,” Tony muttered, hovering away from it. “Cap!” He shouted, taking the mask off and stepping into the jet. “The engine’s done— look, we can’t function with one so we’re just gonna have to land.”

“Tony—“ Steve said, clearly struggling. He was tapping frantically on the screen, and moving the joystick. “Tony, I can’t access either engine. It’s like they’re both shut down.”

Panic gripped Tony, though only momentarily until he reached for his phone. Maybe Bruce could access the plane externally, from HQ.

But the network was turned off. 

“FRIDAY?” He called. No response, so he tried again. “FRIDAY, can you hear me?”

Still nothing. Steve flipped through the systems, and clicked on the video-chat symbol. 

“All networks have been suspended,” said a booming automated voice. 

“Steve, grab a parachute,” Tony muttered quickly. He reached for the closet, and realized with a jolt that it was empty. 

“Why is it fucking empty?” he shouted, slamming his hand against the metal. “What the fuck is going on?”

“Two hundred meters,” Steve said, quickly. 

“Hold on to me,” Tony muttered. They moved towards the back, by the exit, but suddenly the hatch began to close. 

“No, open,” Tony shouted. Nothing happened, and he grimaced.

“Tony, I’m sorry,” Steve whispered, hardly audible over the racket of the engine failing.

“Shut up and hold onto me.” And he did, and Tony wrapped his iron arms around Steve’s figure as he readied his blasters. With a crash he blew them through the window, spiraling, ears ringing with pain and shattered glass. But as they were falling, his blasters started to fail, systems hurtling into overdrive. He could feel the suit failing, and they plummeted too, alongside the quinjet, until everything went dark.

—

The first thing Tony did when he woke up was search the rubble of the quinjet. Steve was back behind him; alive, and breathing, but still knocked out. 

His entire body ached, and in some spots came a sharp, searing pain. He gritted his teeth and ripped the fabric from the wound on his arm, taking skin and dried blood with it. The cold air stung when it hit the gash.

Only a few of the control panels remained, and one of the lights was still blinking. He clicked it once, but nothing happened. He tried again, moving the the gears and sliding a few of the panels forward, but still, nothing. At least the light was still on.

He got to work moving the rubble from what was left the cockpit area, and the jet creaked from the weight of his footsteps. The glass was shattered, and shards lay scattered along on the floor beneath his feet. Tony dusted it to the side, hissing as he accidentally cut himself. 

The suit was back with Steve, and Tony debated trying to fix that first instead of trying to contact the team, but eventually decided to stick with his original plan. 

The call monitor was still intact, and since the fuel gate was still running he figured he might still be able to get ahold of the compound. 

Yet still, he had an uneasy feeling about this, and about why they had been off-network, and why FRIDAY had been cut from the system so suddenly. 

“Call systems off”, said the bold red letters on the flickering monitor.

He tried again, attempting to override. Still, the same words remained. 

He was starting to get frantic, typing into the keyboard and smashing his fingers down onto the emergency buttons. Nothing happened, except for another “systems offline” report, and he slammed his fist against the mass of buttons. It took a while for him to notice he was already breathing hard.

He swallowed, feeling something start to splinter, and took a moment to hold himself together. This was fine, right? This was okay. He’s been stranded before, so why is this any different?

Suddenly, though, he started to see the light flicker, growing duller and duller. Quickly, he clicked it, over and over but _still_ nothing happened. And God, they were losing their power source. And they were stuck here, freezing their asses off in some uninhabited state of Canada, alone and cold and far, far away from home. 

“Don’t fucking turn off,” Tony muttered, crouching down to mess with the wires beneath the bench. “Please don’t fucking turn off—don’t—“ He faltered, feeling his heartbeat picking up, drumming a rythym through his ears and spiking terror through his body. His hands were shaking, and he cursed himself and the universe for making _this_ happen, _now_. 

“Tony?” Steve’s groggy voice came from behind him. “Tony, what are you—“

“Shut up.” Tony was still crouched, holding his trembling hands up, covering the rest of his face below the eyes. 

“What? I—“

“I said shut up.” His voice was dangerously low and dangerously unstable, and Steve picked up on that quick.

“Look at me,” he commanded, but Tony didn’t move.

“Can’t,” came the low, forced reply. 

“Tony, you need to calm down.”

White hot terror spiked again, and Tony had to force himself to breathe deeply for a moment. 

“Don’t tell me to calm down,” he muttered, still not turning to face the captain.

“Then just look at me.”

“Just let me fucking handle this myself,” he whispered, shaking out his hands. “I’m fine.”

“Tony, you’re shaking.”

“No, only my h—“ he trailed off as he realized Steve was right. He was trembling, head to toe. He shook his head, standing up, unsteady. “It’s fine. It’s nothing, just— just leave me alone.” 

He took a deep breath, hating how shaky it was. His limbs felt dead tired but he forced his arm up to mess with the buttons again, in the desperate hopes that something would turn on. Wind whipped through the jet, through the broken windows and crashed hull, and he started to shiver.

“Please, it’s not working,” he choked, gasping. “Why won’t it turn on?”

“Tony, breathe.”

“The systems were off, Cap.” He turned, and desperately took in air in ragged heaves. “Why? Why were they off?”

“I... don’t know. Something must’ve gone wrong.”

Tony nodded, gripping the edge of the panel until his knuckles turned white. His chest felt like it was closing in on itself, like an invisible cage that he just couldn’t break, no matter how hard he fought.

“I’m gonna die,” he sobbed, reaching up to feel his own pulse, but he was too out of his mind to really read it.

“No, you’re not,” Steve murmured, pulling Tony’s hand down. God, it was shaking. 

Tony shut his eyes tight at the familiar touch of somebody holding his wrist, though usually something like that shouldn’t bother him. But it was just too much, and a piece of him gave in to the pain already.

And they were lost without power in some cold North American tundra, alone and isolated, without a way to get home. This is how people die, right? They starve and freeze, lost in the wild. 

Alone, without power, cold and isolated like he was in the wormhole that day, four years ago. 

It spiraled. He stood up, eyes unfocused as he stumbled out of the rubble of the plane. He needed to get away.

But after a few unsteady steps he fell to his knees on the icy ground, with a thump, hands outstretched and holding him up as he did everything he could to pull himself back together. Everything felt like static, and dull terror that he couldn’t quite put his finger on if he even wanted to. He only wanted it to stop. 

Sobs wracked his body, coupled with gasping breaths desperate for oxygen, until he couldn’t cry anymore, couldn’t speak, only cough and choke and gasp for more air. His arms were numb, just dull pain, and his eyes were shut tight. He was sure he was dying.

But after a few minutes of struggling for air, he finally found a rhythm again, and fell backwards onto his hands, exhausted. He could feel the sharp winter air piercing at his skin now; his senses were returning. He moved to get up, but realized suddenly that Steve was there, sitting next to him in the cold.

“You don’t always have to do that alone, you know,” Steve murmured, still staring across the field. 

“Yeah, well...” Tony swallowed, still unsteady. “I don’t really know any other way.” He wiped the tears drying on his cheeks and paused. Usually he didn’t cry during attacks.

“Are you okay now?”

Tony flexed his hand; it was still shaking, but even that was going away.

“I think.”

“Good. Now, if you remember, you have a near-unlimited power source embedded into that Iron Man suit back there.” Steve nodded to behind them, and Tony blinked.

“Right.” He murmured. “Let’s work on that.”

—

The suit was almost ready for flight, though FRIDAY’s systems were still off. They’d had to fuse some wires and repair two of the blasters but for the most part, there were only minor fixes. 

“You know,” Tony started, still tinkering with one of the jets. “The more I think about it, the less sense it makes. How the Quinjet shut down, I mean.”

“Oh?”

“I mean, _my_ programs are encoded in there. The ones _I_ wrote, not anybody else.” Tony turned, facing Steve. “I think someone hijacked the plane.”

Steve blinked, looking over at the rubble of the jet, eyebrows furrowed, lost in thought. “Maybe,” he murmured, nodding. “I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary.”

“Maybe it was just bad luck, that the engine failed, but... the systems all shut off. That’s not supposed to happen. Actually, the opposite is supposed to happen. There’s supposed to be an alert signal sent back to the compound.” Tony twisted the screw back into place on the boot jet. 

“I think someone got into the system while we were still in Poland,” he continued. “And overrode all my systems. Somebody tried to kill us.”

Steve sighed. “Troubling, but not unusual. Who do you think? Hydra?”

“I don’t know,” Tony said. “If it were Hydra, they would’ve planted a bomb and been done with it.”

Steve froze.

“Tony.”

“What?”

Steve swallowed. They were in the cockpit now, cold wind still gentle blowing through the cracked windows and broken walls, but shielded from the worst of it. 

“Do you think... maybe, they could’ve done that, too.”

“What, planted a bomb? It would’ve gone off in the crash, for sure.”

“Not Hydra’s,” Steve muttered, standing up and visually sweeping the area, to see if anything was out of place. “Hydra builds bombs meant for this sort of thing.”

Tony’s blood ran cold. “Steve... what time is it?” He looked up at the sky; it was turning to dusk. His hands were starting to shake again, and he clenched them tight.

“8:30,” he muttered. “Shit. Tony, get out of the plane.”

Tony did. He pulled his iron man suit with him, dragging it out into the cold, and steve followed a few minutes later. 

“Nothing’s inside,” Steve told him. “If there’s a bomb, it’s on the outside.”

“The outside?”

“It makes sense; our alarms would’ve gone off if they’d stepped inside. Any tampering done to the jet would have to be external.”

“But the programs?”

“I have no idea.” 

Tony swallowed, nodding. Guilt spiked through his chest. If they had died, it would’ve been on him; it’s his programming that was hijacked.

“I’ll have to rewrite the subscripts, the... the whole program, really.” Tony stiffened. “What’s that noise?”

“What noise?” asked Steve.

But eventually he heard the beeping, too, growing louder and louder until it was all they could hear. Tony stepped back, farther and farther away from the plane ruins. 

“Steve.” Tony turned, breathing hard. “Steve, run.”

—

The explosion area was massive. Tony could still hear it ringing in his ears as he traced the perimeter of the dark marks on the ground. He was numb with shock, swallowing thickly as he realized just how lucky they were than neither was hit with debris. The plane simply didn’t exist anymore.

“They wanted to blow up the hangar,” Steve muttered, crouching. “With us still in it.”

He was right. At 8:35, if the engines hadn’t failed and Steve and Tony hadn’t crash-landed, the team would be in the hangar, welcoming the two of them home and celebrating their victory. That’s when the Hydra agents had programmed the bomb to go off. With the systems down, nobody would’ve suspected a thing. 

“I’m gonna throw up,” Tony muttered, bending over, hands on his knees.

“Are the blasters working?” Steve asked, looking at the iron man suit. It had been protected from the blast behind a rock. 

Tony nodded, wiping at his eyes. He tilted his head backwards, blinking up at the darkening sky. “Yeah,” he murmured. “Let’s go.”

—

“Oh, my God, Tony, you scared us half to death,” Pepper whispered into his ear as he held her tight.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Tell me again, why your plane crashed? When did the explosion happen?” Rhodey asked, talking quick. That’s how Tony knew he was nervous.

“Engine failed, so I tried to land the plane,” Steve told him, sitting on the couch, staring into the fire in the fire pit. “Systems shut down on me when I switched the gears.”

“Bomb went off at 8:35, on the dot,” Tony finished. A cold sweat crawled up his spine. 

“Your arrival time.” Pepper pulled back. “They wanted to kill all of us.”

“Exactly.” Tony nodded. But then suddenly his terror spiked, flooding through his chest. He could feel his hands start to shake again. “Fuck.”

“What?” Pepper asked. But she could tell, too.

“Why does this happen to me?” He muttered, walking away. She followed, reaching for his hand. 

“Think through it, Tony. Talk yourself through it. That’s what works right? Listen. You’re safe right now.” She cupped his face, staring into his eyes. He wanted to melt into hers. 

“I’m safe right now.” He swallowed, shutting his eyes, focusing on her touch, her hands on his face. “I’m safe because I’m at the compound. I’m safe because you’re here, b-because Steve’s here, and Rhodey...” Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes, and he brought his hand up to wipe his face with his sleeve. “Jesus, Pep, this already happened today. I already had an attack.”

“Keep talking yourself through it,” she whispered, lowering her hands. Quickly, he grabbed them, holding tight. 

“Don’t go,” he whispered, forced.

“I’m not,” she said. “I’m right here.”

“We succeeded,” he said, voice shaking. He tried to steady it. “We blew up another Hydra base. We made it out alive when they tried to kill us. Everybody I love is safe.” He opened his eyes, and exhaled slowly. The sudden fear was gone. “You’re all safe.”

He looked over at Rhodey and Steve, and they nodded.

“Let’s fix you up,” Rhodey said, sitting him down on the couch next to Steve. He held the first aid kit, and Tony suddenly realized how much his scrapes burned. 

“I need to sleep,” Tony whispered, swallowing thickly. “God, I need sleep.”

“Yeah, you do,” Rhodey said, standing up. “Both of you.”

Steve cracked a wrecked, half-smile, looking up and.

“I was asleep for seventy years, colonel,” he murmured. “Just can’t seem to get enough.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank u for reading this hehe


End file.
